Heidi E. Mayon

A year ago, Mayon was advising a major investor on forming a SPAC, or “special purpose acquisition company.”

That’s a shell company that gathers investments, goes public and then merges with a growing private business. The maneuver allows the business to become a public company without the complications of an initial public offering.

More recently, she has been spending a lot of her time “de-SPACing.” That’s the process of merging and converting the SPAC into its merger target.

“It’s just a different way that companies go public these days,” Mayon said.

For one of those transactions, she advised Cano Health LLC, a chain of clinics in Florida focused on improving care for Latino Medicare patients. The deal with a SPAC named Jaws Acquisition Corp. gave Cano an enterprise value of $4.4 billion. Jaws’ shareholders gave final approval to the merger in early June.

The health sector was busy last year, Mayon said. For another de-SPACing, she represented Better Therapeutics Inc., a company developing digital tools to treat metabolic diseases such as diabetes. The deal values the company at $187 million.

Her real passion, though, is initial public offerings, and last year she did two big ones. In January, she represented PoshMark Inc. in its IPO of 6.6 million shares, which brought the company’s market capitalization near $7 billion.

She advised the underwriters in December in the year’s third-biggest offering, DoorDash Inc.’s 33 million-share IPO. It raised nearly $3.4 billion and put the company’s value close to $38 billion.

DoorDash was one of the very few multibillion-dollar deals in Silicon Valley led by women, and it was fun, Mayon said. “I really enjoy being able to understand the business and explain that business to investors while making sure we are minimizing any legal exposure.”

Also fun was Doximity Inc.’s June IPO. The company is a professional network for medical professionals with close to 2 million members. The IPO raised more than $600 million.

— Don DeBenedictis